“They all died, a hundred soldiers died in the country that was ours. But the forked-tongued ones who sent them did not die. I think they are living yet.”
III
The New Medicine Power
“We have lost Tashina somewhere, Grandfather,” I said.
The remark, dropped into a long-sustained silence, fell like a pebble upon empty air. The old man’s eyes remained closed and the sharply cut features expressed nothing but age. At length his face came alive with a slowly spreading smile, and he looked at me with gentle, grandfatherly eyes.
“The pretty little girl is not lost,” he said. “There is a long road, and she is yonder. But when we get there she will not be playing with her tepee, and I shall never be her horse again.
“That time when the hundred died, the Miniconjous were camped up the creek from us, and our mothers would not let us leave our village to play. ‘If you do not stay at home, and if you are not good,’ they would tell us, ‘the bad Wasichus will get you.’ So I did not see her then; and when the big trouble was over for a little while, her band was far away.
“I think the soldiers who were left in the town they built on Piney Creek were cold and hungry all that winter. If they wanted wood, they had to fight to get it. Our warriors burned their hay, and if they wanted brush to feed the mules and horses, they had to fight and die. If they wanted water from the frozen creek, they had to give some blood for it.
“More soldiers came with oxen pulling their wagons. Then the snow was deeper and deeper on the road, and there were no more wagons. Always there were hungry wolves about the soldiers’ town. Our younger men were the wolves.
“Before the snow melted, my father was not sick any more and he could ride a horse and fight. But his hip was not good, and I can see him walking on one side with his hand on the other leg.
“The grass came back. It was summer, and the hearts of our people were strong because they knew the Wasichus could not steal the road to where the yellow metal was—the stuff that always makes them crazy. There was a big sun dance that made our people new again. Then it was the Moon When Cherries Blacken [August], and there was another big fight. We call it the Attacking of the Wagons. It was bad. I saw it from a hill, and I was only nine years old; but after that I think I was never all a boy any more. I saw, and when I sit and think, I see it all again; but I have heard much too, and part of what I see I must have heard.